Posts filed under ‘Health’

IN THE NEWS – A woman bought a box of crackers from a Whole Foods and found an envelope stuffed with $10,000 in it. Debra Rogoff and her Irvine, Calif. family called police and was initially told the money could be part of a drug drop. Police later heard from store managers at Whole Foods in Tustin that an elderly woman had come in a few days earlier, hysterical because she had mistakenly returned a box of crackers with her life savings inside. In a mix-up the store restocked the box rather than composting it. Luckily for her, the box of Annie’s Sour Cream and Onion Cheddar Bunny crackers were bought by the Rogoffs, who discovered the crisp $100 bills in an unmarked white envelope on Oct. 10.
COMMENTARY – This is the kind of story that could only happen in the quirky world of health food stores.
1) God bless the elderly. You got $10,000 and you want to save it so you put it in a friggin’ bag of crackers? And then you mistakenly return it to the organic grocery? Look, granny, it’s organic. All their food tastes like that. SHIT!
2) And the free-spirits who run this health food place take the returned bag of crackers some dementia-ridden 90-year-old has opened and eaten out of and return it to the shelf?
What else do you expect from the only industry that can get away with charging $6 for a fucking candy bar. That’s right. The Guylian Dark Chocolate Orange Filled Candy Bar is all natural. And sells for as much as $5.95. Suckers. And if you’re lucky, you won’t get one that has a bite taken out of it.

Let’s be clear what this IS NOT.
It is NOT a diet plan. It IS not a way for you to eat healthy.
It is a system that will get you to drop weight. I’ve never seen it not work.
And that’s all I can promise.
It’s counting calories to an obsessive level. And before you roll your eyes, think about how often you DON’T do that. That is why people can’t lose weight.
Sounds simple? Yet, I’ve never known anyone to have the willpower and determination to stick with it over a several year period.
Besides me.
In 1999, I had ballooned to 223 pounds. I was 5-foot-11 and weighed 159 pounds when I met my wife in college just 10 years earlier.
What happened? I had no clue.
Then I started counting calories and stuck with it.
As I type this, I weigh 174 pounds, a weight I’ve been at for nearly five years. I’ve gotten as high as 189, but then got back on my system and the weight came off just as it had numerous times in the past.
This post shows a simple way to take weight off and keep it off. It took 50 pounds off me in six months in 2002. More than six years later, I’m at that same weight.
This is not a diet. It is a lifestyle. Once you start it, I’ve never seen this system fail UNLESS it is not followed. And even then, it’s as simple as getting back on the system to get the results you want.
This system is simply knowing how fattening EVERY single thing you put in your mouth is. Once counted, you stay to a certain calorie level and watch the weight come off.
What’s the figure?
Roughly, 1,600 for a woman, 1,800 for a man.
I lost my weight at 2,000 calories a day. I reduced it once I stopped losing weight and leveled off.
I know a former co-worker who went through gastric bypass surgery because he had no luck losing any weight. He can’t control when he has bowel movements.
This system seems a bit kinder on the body.
Here’s the No. 1 rule of being overweight:
WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW MAKES YOU FAT
There was a woman in my office who had a candy dish. They are very popular. During the course of a work day, I found myself eating 10 Hershey Kisses candies. Each one was 25 calories. I considered them insignificant. By the end of the week, I’d eaten about 1,250 calories from the candy disk a week. Now, consider two Big Macs and a small order of French fries from McDonalds is 1,310 calories.
Yet, if I had eaten that McDonalds food, I would have felt much guiltier and been much more aware of my caloric intake than just by popping 10 Kisses in my mouth over the course of a week.
WRITE IT DOWN
Keep a piece of paper handy at all times and write down what you eat. At first, it will require research. After a while, being creatures of habit, it will be much easier to track.
Starburst candy? 25 calories a piece.
A slice of bacon? 75 calories.
Soon, you’ll become an expert. People will seek you ought for the more complicated meals.
A Caesar’s salad with extra ham, a little salad dressing and a bread stick. Boom! You’ll give them a figure, they’ll go research it and be amazed how close you were.
Simply break down the meal into the individual parts.
Extra ham? How much? About 1 slice from an Oscar Mayer package is 20 calories. The estimate is 3 slices – so 60 calories. Salad dressing is about 75 calories. Salad is free. A bread stick is about 105 calories.
Track it all.
EXERCISE IS GOOD, BUT NOT NECESSARY
By walking briskly for 30 minutes, I would burn about 200 calories. Then I’d eat four Bavarian pretzels when I was done over an hour watching TV. I was + 200 calories for the night.
Ironically, you could stop walking, eat just one Bavarian pretzel and be better off.
DON’T BORROW CALORIES
When counting calories, don’t go over into the next day. I call this “carryover” calories. It doesn’t work and sabotages the system.

Don’t do LESS than your target calorie number. If you have set 1,800 calories, eat to that level. Consistency is the key to success.
Don’t cheat! This whole system is an acknowledgement of what you are eating, not trying to skimp around. You are only cheating yourself.
How to do it?
Tracking the calories isn’t always easy.
Try finding an easy way to track calories in a hamburger you make at home.
If you eat out, you can make some decent comparables.
For years, I figured a ½ pound hamburger at a local diner was 700 calories. Then, after four years of this, I did a similar comparison to a TGIF type restaurant chain. I found the actual calories for that ½ pound burger was more like 1,150 calories. Big difference.
It’s not easy staying thin. Choices have to be made and they are not fun.
There is probably a list of 10 things I can no longer eat or drink anymore because of the high calories involved.
Milk shakes? Forget it. When driving my 40 mile commute back from work, I would get tired, sometimes almost dozing off. To keep me awake, I made a practice of buying a 32 ounce “Triple Thick” Strawberry milk shake from McDonalds. I loved them. It was 1,100 calories.
Simply put, there are foods you will no longer be able to eat if you want to stay within your caloric range. There is no way around that.
Chinese food is pretty much history.
Drink diet soda. You won’t be able to afford the empty calories in juices and non-diet soda pop.
YOU WILL FAIL
We are human.
The beauty of this system? The next day you start again. Eventually, you will lose the weight. Then it becomes, how much weight do you want to lose?
FAILURE IS INEVITABLE FOR SOME
The system has worked for every one who sticks with it.
A friend of mine had a heart attack at 36 and put on weight. He knew my system because over the years when I had visited him, he saw me taking out a piece of paper and writing down all the cookies I would eat.
After five years, he tried the system himself.
I could tell he was not serious.
He didn’t write down what he ate. He’d ask the amount of calories and then do the math in his head.
Then three weeks later, we had a meeting of college friends at Michigan State University.
He ate a full-course meal. And those are the hardest to calculate. There was Spanish rice, mashed potatoes, gravy, and prime rib. My guess at first glance, well over 2,000 calories, not including the two beers.
And then he went to another restaurant and had an order of nacho chips with salsa and two more beers. He capped off our four-hour excursion with a Starbucks latte, roughly 220 calories.
My guess is that he consumed perhaps 3,500 calories that night. That’s just about two days worth of food for me.
He wasn’t counting calories. The system won’t work for him.
And it won’t work for you, unless you control what you eat.
Now, I’ve had days like that. Days were I just went overboard.
But perhaps in my five years on my system, it’s happened once a year.
I’ve worked too hard and it feels too good to put on pants I couldn’t fit into and see a full three-inch gap around my waist.
But there is a price you pay.
I haven’t ordered General Tso’s chicken in five years. I miss the General.
For Fathers Day a couple years ago, I took my two sons to the Outback Steakhouse.
My then 17-year-old son ordered the Bloomin’ Onion.
I fell in love with it and ordered my own. I estimated the calories at roughly 800. It was a high price to pay, but well worth it.
I got back home on the Internet and looked it up.
My jaw dropped – 2,300 calories.
Back in the days where I was the fattest, I had no idea why I was getting fatter the more I exercised.
I would ride my bicycle for an hour non-stop at a fairly fast speed, roughly 16 mph on average. I found that it burned about 860 calories.
Then I went to celebrate my workout with all-you-can-eat Chinese food buffet. Looking back, my guess is I put away close to 4,000 calories that day.
And two days later on the scale, I was 2 pounds heavier and wondering what I was doing wrong.
CHEATING
The most common way to cheat is what I call the “serving size” error.
Anything that is hard to measure you tend to underestimate.
I love Nestles frozen chocolate chip cookie dough – the Yule log form. It measures calories by serving – about 150 per serving. I ate nine servings and the cookie dough log was gone. I looked at the package, there were 19 servings per log. I was eating 310 calories, about twice as much as I thought.
Frosted mini-wheats are the best. They tell you the amount of calories per mini-wheat. I actually count the amount of mini-wheats I throw in my bowl.
Some of this sounds ridiculous.
Many a people have mocked me for keeping my calorie sheets and actually counting mini-wheats.
But I’m at the same weight I’ve wanted to be at for five years.